U.S. Rugby Parabiago visited Rugby VII Torino in Settimo Torinese, and got away with victory after a closely fought match. 24-23 was the final score, after a last second kick by the hosts bounced off the bar.

There was no live rugby for me last weekend, therefore I have been doing some digging in my "pics that should be published" list. And the result is ... more pictures from the 2010 Aviva Ironman 70.3 triathlon competition, held in Singapore on 21st March 2010.

As I said a few weeks ago, in October I had the opportunity to follow an American football match from the sidelines. In 2010. Two-thousands-and-ten. That's about thirty years after the first NFL match I saw on tv. Well, yes, I did wait a bit. And thanks to the Rivoli Blacks press agent - and to coach Gianni Brena, I suppose - I have been welcomed on the sidelines of the Blacks complex in Grugliasco, near Turin (that's Turin, Italy, not Turin, Georgia, USA).

Guess what: it did rain a lot. And it was a dark Saturday night. It looks like I am bound to take sports pics in near darkness, lately...

Not. Enough. Light. Did I say that already? Light is really the most important thing one can ask for, when taking pictures. The light I found in the American West was great. The low, wintry light I encountered in New Zealand was almost magic. Taking good pictures with that kind of light was a pleasure and almost a guarantee of good pics.

Whatever the excuse, the 8Gb of pics I took during the Blacks-Lanceri match were mostly unusable. Which is a pity, because the match - valid for the Under 21 FIF championship - was exciting, despite being quite one-sided. Very one-sided, in truth: the Blacks won fair and square, beating the Lanceri Novara 50-0. Most of the points came from #28, a Mr. Roagna who seems to be quite apt at running wild along the sidelines. This is Italian American football, and Roagna is no Chris Johnson, but on that night, he certainly looked like the Tennessee Titans standout.

A few pics below. #27 is a very young promise for the Blacks team, playing for their Under 13 squad.

Keeping the camera dry on such a rainy day was just not possible, so I am glad the camera did not die on me. And a brighter lens would have been in order: the Sigma 50-500mm offers a range few lenses can match, but it is not the right lens if you have to work in overcast weather. And talking about this... if anybody has a Nikkor 80-200mm/2.8 to sell, let me know.

Despite the above mentioned limitations, I took many pictures at the match. I am publishing them in case some of the players fancy having a memento of this well fought match.

Another image from the Rugby VII Torino vs Borgo Poncarale match played on 31/10/2010. The player on the ground was initially hidden by a forest of legs; I took this picture after most of the players had moved away.
Quite remarkably, he appeared to not having been hit while laying on the ground.

Despite watching rugby since the early Eighties, I have never seen a live rugby match before this, in October 2010. Rugby was not the most common sport in my neighbourhood in Italy, and even in the years I spent in the UK I have never seen people playing rugby. So all the rugby players I have ever seen were in their 20s or 30s. I am glad to see that there are exceptions, and that age, sometimes, does not matter: the gentleman wearing the yellow and blue jersey in the pictures below is not in this 30s, and most definitely not in his 20s. And he played as good as any other player on the field in the two Rugby VII Torino matches I watched, with Borgo Poncarale and with Rugby San Mauro.

The location: Settimo Torinese, near Turin, in Italy. The event: a rugby match between Rugby VII Torino, the home team, and Borgo Poncarale from Veneto. The unwelcome guest: rain constantly pouring down on players, umpires and yours truly.

The first time I watched a Six Nations match on tv was around 1982, and back then that rugby competition was still known as the Five Nations. The first time I watched an NFL match on TV was in the early 1980s, and the Oakland Raiders were playing with Jim Plunkett as quarterback. American football has been one of the enduring passion of my life, and rugby is a sport I appreciate a lot.

And up to the past weekend I had never seen a live rugby match or a live American football match, despite spending two years in the USA and five in England. Well, that's sorted now.

Thanks to the Blacks Rivoli (football) and to the VII Rugby Torino, I have been allowed to shoot two matches from the sidelines: Blacks Rivoli vs Lancieri Novara, a match valid for the Italian Under 21 American Football Championship on Saturday night; then, on Sunday afternoon, the VII Torino Rugby vs San Mauro, valid for the Seniores Championship.

Well, here are a few pictures taken Sunday. Thanks to Graziano Destro of VII Rugby Torino for providing me with sideline credentials. The team's name is a wordplay, since the Roman ordinal VII is read, in Italian, as "Settimo", which is also the name of the city where the team plays, Settimo Torinese.

After nine years, I have left my job as webmaster for a large logistics company. That job took me from Turin to London, to Atlanta, then to Singapore. I am grateful for the opportunities I had in these years and for the people I met, ... and let's cut this thing here, since this is not an Academy Award speech.

I will be in Singapore all May and in the first week of June, thanks to a bureaucratic mishap, and I will try to make the best of these extra few weeks here. I am trying to improve my sports shooting skills, so - if you are in Singapore and know of a competition that is not listed at redsports.sg/sports-calendar/ or in other online sports calendar, please let me know using the comments form at the bottom of this page.

Also, if you practice cricket, rugby, squash, football, tennis, hockey (field or ice), volleyball, basketball, dragon boat, and any other sport, and you would like to have you and your team's pictures taken for free during a competition or in training, please provide me with details with the comment form here, or contact me using the About page.

Sunday morning. You plan to sleep well into the morning, and maybe even reach that long-sought after goal, waking up at noon, to make up for a long backlog of lost sleep.
And at ten o'clock an unbelievably loud noise, akin to somebody switching on all the 100,000 Toyota Corolla recalled in Brazil, wakes you up. It comes from the other bank of the river, a few hundreds meters from your flat.

You have two options:
1) earplugs, sleeping mask, and you will yourself back to sleep;
2) camera, long lens, bicycle, and you ride across the bridge to see where all the noise is coming from.

I took the second option, and rode on the Benjamin Sheares Bridge towards Marina Promenade. And surprise... it wasn't Toyota testing 100,000 cars. 'Twas just a simple car race. Very simple, actually: sports cars started in couple, ran for a few hundreds metres in a straight line, then accelerated sideways through three bends, often bouncing against each other, and made it back to where they started from. There was a ticket a queue, designated areas, designated footpaths. No thanks, just give me the cars.
And indeed they gave me - and everybody else, paying audience and freeloaders on the bridge - the cars.

A few more pictures taken at the 2010 Aviva Ironman 70.3 in Singapore, on 21st March 2010. Sport portraits, if you want, bearing in mind the obvious: these are not portraits taken in a studio, with makeup and lighting designed to enhance the model's features. These pictures were taken hours into a triathlon race, when the athletes had already a long swim and many miles of cycling on their back and, most importantly for a portrait, on their faces.

A picture of racer #3879 at the OSIM International Triathlon competition in Singapore. A hot day, as usual, I hope all athletes remembered to put as much sun cream as I did; I got sunburnt the day before, at the Singapore Soccer Sixes.

It was too rainy to watch triathlon, today, so I went the City Hall area with the idea of visiting Peninsula Plaza and Funan Centre, And I accidentally stumbled upon an international football competition at Padang, the sports field in front of City Hall. The Singapore Soccer Sixes is a six-a-side football tournament with many very short matches (see the rules).

In Singapore, three weeks ago we had the Aviva Ironman 70.3. This weekend we have the OSIM International Triathlon 2010. Is Singapore a triathlon-crazy island?

I don't know much about triathlon, I have no problems admitting that. I know athletes swim, then they ride a bicycle, then they run. Then, if they were like me, they would swear they will never do anything like that again. And on Tuesday they would be training.

I was saying I do not know much about triathlon, and I cannot claim to know much about Singapore, despite having spent here the last two years. The usual stereotypes of 'work hard, eat well, go shopping, travel abroad" and the status symbols listed as "the five Cs" (Condo, Cash, Credit card, Card, Country club)(ok, that's seven) are not enough to explain a country. But one thing seems true: "commitment to excellence", the slogan that used to be the core of the Oakland Raiders' approach to sports, applies to Singapore as well. Even more, actually:nowadays, the Raiders are regular NFL losers, while Singapore thrives. And that desire to excel and to lead might help to understand why there are so many triathlon competitions in Singapore (well, at least in the last few weeks).

If anybody has global statistics on the number of triathlon amateur and professional athletes, let me know: I believe Singapore has way more than its fair quota of triathletes, a disproportionate high number for such a relatively small country.

Well, after all this blabbing, I will be near the ECP, tomorrow, to take pictures of the OSIM International Triathlon 2010. I will take pictures of most athletes, probably, as I did at the Aviva Ironman, but if you want to be sure that I take pictures of you, tell me: leave a comment at the bottom of this page indicating your race number (I hope those have been assigned already), or nod/pat me on the shoulder/smile when you ride past me, tomorrow at the race. But please do not crash to attract my attention: I have a few pictures of people crashing at the Ironman, no need to have more...

How to spot me: I am an ang mo, about 1.84m, between scrawny (US standards) and slim (European standards), fair-ish hair, primary-colour t-shirt (red, blue or green) and green-gray shorts, big black backpack on my shoulders, Nikon D300, and probably an unusual point of view (either very low, or very close to the athlete

Other pictures taken last week near the Somerset MRT. Dozens of skaters on skateboards and on rollerblades, several photographers around, glorious sunshine (which disappeared too soon behind the buildings surrounding the area). As in every sport, you try to get as close as possible to the action without damaging the show: if skaters have to pay more attention to you than to their own line/speed/position, you are wasting their time and yours.

December 2009, you wake up in the morning and what's out of the window? Catamarans racing in the Kallang Basin. On a sunny day. When there's nothing else to do.
As Mr. Wilde used to say, "I can resist everything except temptation". So out I went, with a bicycle, an overweight backpack and not enough sun cream. A few sample photos are below, mostly taken with the Nikon D300 and the Sigma 50-500mm.

Spent a few hours next to the Somerset MRT station, taking pictures of skaters (on skateboards and on rollerblades).

The more sports pictures I take, the more I understand why pro sport photographers love their 300/2 and the other bright glass they have: there's never enough light! I took most of my pictures with a 18-105mm today, and I used a 50-500mm for a few others. I could have done with the 10-20mm, for images close to the ramps, and with a 50mm/1.8 for the others. Next time...

A few other pictures from the Aviva Ironman 2010, the triathlon competition that took place in Singapore on 21st March 2010. Below you will see pictures of competitors #49, #95, #314, #608, #808, #950, #967, #1117 and of another unknown guy whose number is not visible in the picture.

As said in my previous post, if you have taken part to the Aviva Ironman 2010 and you want a larger version of a picture of you (cycling, crashing, running, but no swimming), contact me at info AT claudiopiombetti.com; I will send your picture for free for non-commercial use (printing it and giving it to your friends is OK). If you do not appear in th

I have enjoyed watching the Aviva Ironman 2010 triathlon competition, last Sunday. I did take quite a few pictures, these are a few samples:

Racer Dai Matsui (#866) of Japan:

Racer Domenico Passuello (#11) of Italy:

If you were at the race and you are interested in the picture(s) I might have taken of you cycling or running during the race (sorry, no swimming), contact me at info AT claudiopiombetti.com. I will let you have those pictures for free.

Soon online:
- The list of race numbers for which I have pictures;
- CSS (you might not care, but that's one of the main differences between a crappy-looking web page and a good-looking one);
- More sample pictures;
- Pics of the fencing competition that took place in Singapore in Feb 2010.